The Alienist

and

Blood Tracks

NY: Berkley, 1998.
America invented itself about a hundred years ago, and has never quite
recovered. We have been an urban, mobile, corporate, violent, high-tech, information-processing, imperialistic, corrupt democracy
running on advertising, mass consumption, unlimited entertainment, fossil fuels
and sheer brass since about the 1880s, and we're still shocked,
shocked not to find ourselves back down on the farm, looking forward
to a barn-raising as the high point of the year. (We're still religious,
though; we and the Iranians are the only peoples who've emerged from even
partial industrialization fanatically devout.) This makes the turn of the last
century a fine setting for historical fiction: remote enough to be interesting,
not so remote as to be truly alien. (They do things differently there, but
they do the same things.) The two books under review both use that setting;
both, moreover are mysteries, or at any rate stories about murder and whodunit.
That is about all they have in common. Carr's novel was a best-seller, and
enthusiastically received; Cercone's is a largely unknown child of the
mid-list. It is also a much better novel.

Carr has a promising premise --- the murders take place in New York City in
1896, and are to be solved by some former students of William James --- the
journalist narrator, the alienist (read: shrink) of the title, and Teddy
Roosevelt, the reformist police commissioner --- and proceeds to systematically
ruin it. First of all, it's a serial killer story, and this reduces the plot
to (as James would've put it) a mere concatenation of reflex discharges. We
begin with the remains, elaborately described, of a gruesomely murdered
juvenile transvestite prostitute; and not until several similar murders have
been perpetrated (and described) does anyone heed our heroes' warnings about
what is happening. Then the heroes must desperately race against time to
figure out what makes the killer tick, on the basis of what he does to his
victims; and so there's even more descriptions of corpses, and potential
corpses. (This is, however, probably the only serial killer story where the
profilers read Hume in the course of duty.) Nearly every protagonist (TR is
mercifully excepted) is forced to confront deep dark secrets about their abused
childhood. And so on, through all the conventions of that supremely hackneyed
sub-genre. (Writers like Carr should pay royalties to whoever invented the
formula; maybe they do.) These moves are worse than utterly predictable; they
are anachronistic. (The profiling --- accurate, of course --- uses the
watered-down Freudianism universal in serial-killer yarns, here as plausible as
Prozac.)

Second: Carr stumbles --- or rather, throws himself --- into almost every
trap that lies in wait for a historical novelist. (His characters do refrain
from modern idioms.) Writers of historical fiction, of science fiction and of
stories set in foreign lands all have to let their readers know how the society
of the story works, at least those aspects of it which are both relevant to the
story and strange to the readers. The crudest and most awkward way of doing so
is to simply stop the story while someone expounds how things are, and why they
are that way; SF readers call this an info-dump. Carr is in this respect, as
in others, an exceptionally crude novelist, and makes the narrator deliver a
one or two paragraph info-dump every few pages. (Some of these actually
contain interesting information, but that's not the point.) Again: it's an
exceptionally poor and shabby period which doesn't have lots of people at least
as interesting and improbable as any a novelist might concoct. Why not have the
protagonists encounter them, and rope them into the plot? Why not indeed?
Carr has done this to the very limits of plausibility, and beyond. On top of
all this, modern political concerns are projected back into the past. [Spoiler, involving unions.]

Third: the characters are cardboard --- soggy, uncorrugated cardboard. The
most engaging one is Roosevelt, and I half suspect that's because he's kept
off-stage most of the time. (TR is presented very sympathetically, probably
more sympathetically than he deserves; but that's another story for another
time.) By the end, however, I was no longer indifferent to them: I hoped the
serial killer would slaughter them all. (No such luck.)

It is with considerable relief that I turn from contemplating The
Alienist to Cercone's book. It is the second book in a series set in in
Pittsburgh in 1905, but completely self-contained. (I've not read the
predecessor.) Pittsburgh is actually an inspired choice, since it was at the
time a center of industrial wealth, of technological innovation and (therefore)
of often murderous struggle between organized labor and big business.
(Cercone's sympathies in that struggle are clearly on the right, i.e. the Left,
side, but she doesn't propagandize.) The city and its environs is described in
a wealth of accurate, sooty and affectionate detail --- as is, to do him
justice, Carr's New York. In every other respect I can think of, however,
Blood Tracks is far superior. It has two likeable protagonists,
through whose eyes we alternately peer: an immigrant Armenian cop, trying to
stay only minimally corrupt, and an Irish-Italian socialist journalist, trying
to live down her divorce. They actually come across as characters, with depth
and lives (including no more than ordinarily dysfunctional families) beyond the
immediate needs of the plot. The dialogue does not crawl across the page like
a winded slug. The reader learns plenty, but does not have to endure constant
info-dumps. Murders take place for perfectly rational reasons, and are solved
without sham psychology. Cameos by the famous are minimal, and don't strain
credulity. The plot moves briskly, despite taking several surprising twists.
This is, in short, a very well-constructed and intelligent entertainment, far
more enjoyable than Carr's and less than half the length.

I picked up The Alienist because I was flying across country,
had foolishly brought nothing to read, and everything else in the airport
bookstore looked worse; I don't think anything but the prospect of staring out
the window at Iowa would've kept me reading to the end. I can't imagine
reading any other fiction by Carr, unless similarly trapped by circumstances
and my own poor planning. Blood Tracks, on the other hand, was
very fun, and I'm certainly going to hunt down both its predecessor
(Steel Ashes) and the one sequel to date (Coal
Bones), and look for more books by Cercone.

The Alienist is currently in print as a paperback (NY: Bantam,
1995), US$7.50, ISBN 0553572997, and as a hardback, US$29.95, ISBN 0679417796.
Blood Tracks is currently in print as a paperback, US$5.99, ISBN
0425162419.
22 March 1999; thanks to a colleague who prefers to remain anonymous for
midnight Kahlua